Naropa summer learning intensive: Welcome to contemplative education

I had little on which to base any expectations about the Summer Learning Intensive, my introduction to Contemplative Education at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I had the overall character of the schedule (from early in the morning until late into the night, 7 days a week, for 3 1/2 weeks); some summer readings (Turning the Mind into an Ally; Sacred World, and East Meets West, an essay about the formation of Naropa in the early 70's); and a basic understanding that the program enabled teachers and others to integrate mindfulness practices into their lives at work.

Boulder Creek flooding
 from snow melt

Well, that just doesn't give you much to go on. So I just went. It was like stepping into a raging river.

There's not much you can do but just hold on for the ride. And you're going to get bumped, scraped up, and if you're not careful, you'll drown. Assuming you survive, it's quite an experience.

Thursday was the first full day and it was filled with orientations, introductions, getting settled in. Friday was my first immersion experience. I went under for the first time at Amy Howard's thesis project presentation.

Tradition; trust; natural loveliness 

Amy's talk was about opening to being awake, and redefining the meaning of your life. She asked us to file by two long, low tables of nicely matted photographs and just notice each one. When we returned to our seats, she asked us to think about which one had appealed the most to us, moved us in some way. We returned to the tables, took the picture that had affected us the most, and returned to our seats. I chose the one to the left. She asked us to take a moment to reflect on and write about what about that photograph had affected us.

This image reflects qualities that I wish I had -- grace, strength, comfort in your own body, and a natural beauty that seems to come from a connection to something larger than yourself, in this photograph, a tradition that probably goes back many many years. And trusting in your larger community. My feeling was one of sadness. I often feel sad when I see something so achingly beautiful. It's like my heart just breaks open and sadness flows out. I have always wondered why this happens. Why doesn't love and beauty and grace and connection bring about joy, rather than sadness (Personal Journal Entry, June 23, 2011)?

Closed enso

I didn't have to wait long to find the answer to that question, one that had puzzled me for decades. But before that question got its answer, Saturday came: Graduation for the outgoing class. The ceremony was stunning. Seven students in their turn, each creating an enso brushstroke, a circle representing everything, all at once. Poetry, storytelling, the ringing of the gong, tears and joy everywhere. This was no ordinary graduation ceremony.

The ceremony completely exceeded even my wildest imagination of what it might be like to complete this program. The level of compassion, caring, love and commitment, support, energy and passion that everyone, everyone brings to this endeavor is simply unprecedented in my experience, anywhere, for anything. I can't believe I am sitting here, a part of this process. I know it's a university. I know there will be difficulty and adversity and frustration here and there. But that's true everywhere. This love and support is not everywhere. That I recognize. Never do the challenges end. You just meet them differently. That makes all the difference (Personal Journal Entry, June 25, 2011).

Thus began my getting to know a part of myself that I had long ignored -- my heart. It wasn't a matter of "what's going on here," or "why," or of fixing anything. I just started to notice. That's all. The practice for noticing was, first and foremost, meditation. At Naropa, meditation is primarily Shamatha practice, or mindfulness of the breath. You simply, repeatedly, notice what comes up while you sit, and return to observing your breath: in.....out. Thoughts come up, you think them, you go off with them, you notice that you've gone off and you return to Shamatha. Twice each day, 50 minutes in the morning and evening.

"And how might that help?" most everyone wonders.

Shamatha is not an endurance test, nor will it suddenly solve all our problems. But it does help us see how our problems arise, because it trains us in recognizing thoughts and emotions. It also trains us in letting them pass without acting on them. Even when we’re bored, we can work with our minds. This helps us cope in daily life. Because practice has enlarged our perspective beyond identifying with our thoughts and opinions, we’re less likely to act from a tight, self-protected space. We have more patience, more tolerance. We’re more able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. In this way, meditation matures us (Mipham, 2003, p. 83).

So meditation was the constant in our lives. Always there.

Every morning on my
way to class, I stopped by
 the raspberry bushes...

But we also went to work that first week strengthening our practice of noticing through class activities of every kind. We explored our senses, our connection to the world, in fact, where we let the world in. We fine-tuned our ability to observe, and broadened it to include observing the observer, our feelings, our sensations, and our thoughts in response to what we saw, heard, felt, tasted and smelled out there.

Then we studied conceptual approaches to characterizing emotions, and discussed and experienced the different patterns of responses within ourselves that each characterization evoked. For example, Welwood (1983) notes:

In Western culture we have a history of treating emotions with suspicion and contempt, as alien, "other," separate from us. The "passions" have usually been viewed as our "lower nature," from Plato onward. Viewing the source of the passions as Freud did, as an "it" (translated in English as "id"), "a primitive chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement," makes it more difficult to befriend emotions and accept them as part of ourselves" (p. 80).

Welwood (1983) goes on to contrast the Western view with the Buddhist meditative approach, "which considers that it is precisely our alienation from emotions that makes them become so domineering and uncontrollable" (p. 80). I'm quite familiar with the first approach, and quite ready to try something else. So I embraced the practice of staying present with feelings and emotions, befriending them, as Welwood describes it. In short order I began to see this practice as the life-preserver it was. It is what keeps us afloat in the stream. You always have it. You can always just become present with what you are experiencing. Becoming present means observing your felt senses (tightening in the chest, warmth in the throat, pressure or burning in the shoulders, or whatever you sense in your body), your feelings (fear, happiness), your emotions (magnified feelings) and your thoughts. Just see them, notice them all.

Finally, we learned several key buddhist concepts describing the practice of integrating intellectual and intuitive understanding, with awareness of body, felt senses, and mind, to create insight and wisdom. We had been using this practice in our classes and as we prepared our assignments. It's called prajna. Judy Lief (2002) says of prajna,

...as soon as you enter the Buddhist path and start practicing meditation and studying the dharma, you are picking up this sword of prajna. Now that you have this sharp thing, this sword that skewers and cuts through ego trips of all sorts, you have to deal with it (para. 9).

Prajnaparamita

Prajna is represented iconographically by the feminine deity Prajnaparamita ... with four arms. Two arms are folded on her lap in the classic posture of meditation, and her two other arms hold a sword and a book. Through these gestures, she manifests three aspects of prajna: academic knowledge, cutting through deception, and direct perception of emptiness" (para. 18).

Leif (2002) says that we cultivate prajna through refined practices of hearing, contemplating, and meditating. We take what we read, listen to, discuss with others with an open mind; we analyze it, turn it over in our minds and look at it from every point of view we can, and then we sit with it for a time until it becomes something that we know deeply; finally, we live with it for awhile until it is part of our very being, no longer something that we must "recall."

Our final week put all we had been studying, discussing, and practicing to the test in two performances: the Warrior's Exam for Mindful Teacher Class, and Final Performance for our Presence in Teaching Class.

Shambhala rocks

The Warrior's Exam is a form of traditional questioning. Each of the nine of us would have our turns seated on mediation cushions in the center of a circle of witnesses to be the questioner of a student, and the student who answered the question. We had ten questions to study. We would have five minutes to respond to our single question, without notes. After a brief follow-up question of the questioner's device, we would have 2 minutes to respond. Then we would return to our place as witnesses in the circle for the other students. So, each of the nine questions we would answer were drawn from a bowl, along with the names of the questioner and responder for that question.

Prajna was perfect preparation for the exam: we had already heard, read and discussed, with our minds open and non-judging. We had had time to analyze and think about what we had read. We had begun to see how it applied to our own experiences, to begin to incorporate those parts of what we had heard that were meaningful, that were true, for us. And now we were ready to sit with it for awhile longer, to see what became part of us, our very marrow, because that is what was to be our response to our questions. Not a memorized script. Not a fainthearted attempt to explain. But what came from within us, from the place beyond "thinking it up."

It was an exhilarating experience, for all of us. We did the absolute best we could, for all of us. It was the most extended period of time for which I have been present. Not 100%, of course, but for nearly 2 hours, I returned again and again to being there. For everyone. And they were there for me.

HillyHilly trades for a horse

The Final Performance for Presence Class asked from our bodies that same experience of bringing forth form from space, the place beyond thinking. In other words, "let's do a play!" Being present in this context meant struggling with a predictable set of urges -- most notably the urge to run as far and as fast as I could up into the Rocky Mountain foothills. Once I committed to stay present instead of checking out, a myriad of other urges cropped up in the place of the big one. One by one, I faced them all down. I sang, I spoke, I waited for and gave cues, I played my parts, changing costumes, being conscious, taking and giving feedback, getting better each day, being there. I would have to say that I was there just about 100% of the time during the play. I could not let a stray thought take me off. There was absolutely no room for wandering. It was pretty cool.

MM sings HB to CB

Our play was called, Meditation Self-Evaluation, and it presented a series of vignettes representing the thoughts that meditators have as they sit on the cushion, illustrating their successful efforts to let them go (short bursts of thoughts that wander in and easily leave, sometimes of their own accord), and their not so successful efforts (the longer vignettes that spin out a storyline or indulge the meditator in a fantasy): Like a memory of parents arguing; a breakup; a childhood morality tale; a student driver experience; and Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to the meditator.

That one was my idea. So I played it. It was transformative. It brought up every fear, anxiety, and condemnation I could possibly harbor, and I faced them all. That's what in the Shambhala tradition they call being a warrior on this path. Never abandoning yourself.

Thomas's photo of his summer family

So, it was amazing. Practically impossible to convey in a blog post, but making an effort is a good practice. It converted two dozen people from "strangers I've never seen or heard of before" to what one participant called his "summer family." Mine too. I have arrived. I am home (Hahn, 2009).

I flew to my Austin home a day later, had Sunday to relax and readjust, and went to work on Monday. It's Wednesday now. Warrior's Exam was a week ago. I'm still impressed. This is just the first semester.

References

Hanh, T. N. (2009). Happiness: Essential mindfulness practices. Parallax Press.

Hayward, K., & Hayward, J. (1998). Sacred world: The Shambhala way to gentleness, bravery, and power (2nd ed.). Shambhala.

Lief, J. (2002, May). The sharp sword of prajna. Shambhala Sun. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1675&Itemid=0 

Mipham, S. (2003). Turning the mind into an ally. Riverhead Hardcover.

Welwood, J. (1983). Befriending emotions. Awakening the heart (First Edition.). Shambhala.

Spring migration

Migrating Storks, by David King. CC*BY

Every year, about the middle of April, spring migration reaches a crescendo of species and numbers on the move. Birders get pretty busy too. Watching wildlife in beautiful places is a great way to spend April, much better than stressing out about end of semester papers, grades, and life transitions. I've done both, and believe me, it's no contest.

So, this year I met up with a friend from Seattle, and visited my favorite spring birding mecca, Southeast Arizona, then drove out to West Texas with birding buddies for a week that ended with a couple of days in Big Bend. And there were local trips to see Golden-cheeked warblers, participate in breeding bird surveys, and take friends' grandkids to state parks. Plus, there's always backyard birding. All kinds of surprises show up this time of year, along with the summer residents who've been wintering down south.

Having just finished up the beta test of my Zen Birding course, all this spring birding that is, by nature, quite focused on identification, presented an interesting challenge. It took me completely in the opposite direction. In Zen Birding, the challenge is to just be with the birds or whatever else I might be seeing and hearing (that is, to continually return the mind from its chattering about wing bars and eye rings, to simply being present and wordlessly observing). During these spring migration birding trips, the challenge is to bring every skill and ability I have to bear on the question of "what was that?"

Turns out that having two seemingly opposing objectives at the same time is, itself, very much a part of Buddhist seeing and understanding the nature of existence. After all, the sine qua non of insight is that everything is empty of self, and is, instead, a part of everything else. And yet, the experience of self is, well, pretty hard to just set aside. We experience ourselves as selves. We might be mistaken on some level, but in the everyday world we live in things are, as a practical matter, separated from other things in time and space. You and I are not the same thing.

Evidence of this seeming contradiction presents itself constantly, once you recognize that it exists and can't be dismissed. The question becomes, "how do I touch each understanding lightly enough that I can move easily from one to the other, as life requires?"

I am continually reminded of the Buddha's response to the first person he met on the path after he experienced enlightenment, about which I have blogged before -- the interchange in short was: "how did you wake up" -- Buddha drops his bag; "what will you do now" -- he picks the bag back up again and goes off on his way.

It's not that we don't or can't have things, but that we must be able to let them go, to drop them. But life requires that we get from here to there and take our things with us. We must do both.

So, during birding to identify, I was present, I was the birder who knew the names (often enough). But I wanted to be able to drop it instantly. And I wanted to be aware of what I was doing regardless of which approach I took. Because I will forget some day which bird is which, I must be able to let go of the bag in which I define myself as a good birder. I have a preference for the comfort of knowing who I am, but I have to be able to let it go to see what else I might be.

Maybe I am at least a little bit like the birds that probably love the warm south, but let it go to take up epic journeys across thousands of miles to arrive (many, but not all of them) here in North America, where folks like me celebrate their arrival by being here with them.

Watching the Wheels Go 'Round and 'Round

A sunny Wednesday morning in Austin, Texas. Birds are singing, dozens of kinds of flowers blooming in the garden, the doors open, the air fresh and sweet with the scent of Mountain Laurel. And just a few centimeters below the flowers blooming in the beds is rich and rotting compost, dead leaves and insects and molds, all thriving. Ah, life. What we call the good and the bad, it all keeps keeping on.

It's the same eternal keeping on of the Google Book Search project. It has its blooms and sweet breezes and its rot. The cycles seem longer and slower than my garden's, but things do roll around. Another one rolled around yesterday. The NY district court rejected the parties' settlement agreement. A limb got blown off a tree, so to speak. Everyone's talking about whether to let it lie, pick it up and maybe prune it a bit and root it, or just cut the whole tree down. But there's rejoicing that at least something happened. We are so impatient for the next phase. Even though it's never the end of anything, just another step down the path of ... keeping on keeping on.

I read the court opinion rejecting the settlement. I get it. Perhaps because I don't fear Google (all companies have their trajectory, up -- and down), or the processes that allow companies and individuals in them to test the limits of what's possible, and to succeed and to fail, my main reaction was simply recalling Steve Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford grads about 6 years ago, when he used the rejections he'd received in his own life to make the point that bad things aren't necessarily bad. What may seem bad to us can make things turn a different way, and we find something that we never would have found if we hadn't had the bad turn of events making it impossible for us to do what we thought we should do. Jobs strongly urged the grads not to give up, ever, on what they believed in, even if it was not "working," in that others rejected it. Maybe that's what's going on with copyright these days. Many people believe in ideas that others keep rejecting. But the believers keep turning away from the rejections, the failures, and trying other paths, even though it just doesn't seem to ever work. Actually, you might apply this theory to either side's efforts, and it seems to hold true. Things keep breaking, one way or the other, now good for one side, now bad, over and over.

In truth, it is not an all or nothing thing. Jobs does what he does in a world where many people still vehemently reject him and his ideas. But he found a path where he can do it. And we are fortunate to live in a world that allows him to be creative, along side those who disagree and create what they want too. Something like that might happen with copyright too. Creative Commons is a good example. It exists as a result of the failure of efforts to change copyright law through legislative and judicial channels. The architect of the effort that failed didn't give up; he just invented another way. And copyright law didn't change. People just have an easy way to exercise their choice now, to keep for themselves exclusively only a subset of the whole bundle of rights.

So, will the orphans just have to be lost -- a century's worth of works that no one will ever feel safe using? I really doubt that. There is a way. No one has invented it yet, that's all. But I won't be surprised if it's not what anyone is imagining today. Things have a way of taking very strange and wonderful turns. Even if they seem bad at some point along that way.

Zen Birding

Beyond names -- To see, hear, & be with birds

Blue Dacnis (Honeycreeper) by Dario Sanchez: CC*BY 

“Words can express no more than a tiny fragment of human knowledge, for what we can say and think is always immeasurably less than what we experience.” --Alan Watts’ “The Way of Liberation”

Last year I decided to develop a course about Zen birding. Birding beyond naming, beyond identity. I developed a framework and the basic ideas, and then tried to practice the kind of birding that I was preparing to teach. My annual spring Arizona birding trek was the perfect outdoor laboratory, because though I know the birds in some sense, there's always a "relearning" curve because I visit only once each year. At the beginning of each trip, I always have those moments where I hear or see a bird and don't know what it is, though I think I should. The idea of Zen birding is to expand just such a moment, to lengthen and be comfortable with the time of not knowing, to just observe the bird in all its aspects. What happened in practice, however, was that my mind would race to close the gap between seeing or hearing, and naming the bird. My mind wanted so badly to identify the bird, as though that mattered more than anything in the world. Of course, the premise of Zen birding is that it does not matter more. I was there only about 4 days when the gap was down to a minuscule fraction of a second for most birds. Naming became instantaneous. I couldn't not do it. That's when I had an "ah-ha" moment. Zen birding wasn't actually about not naming. It was about observing the mind's desire to name, and letting go of the name as soon as it materialized. That's just basic meditation practice applied to birding -- watch the mind and let thoughts go. Don't grab onto any of them.

As usual, simple enough, but not easy.

It's not easy because learning requires discernment and discrimination, so naming is certainly functional. In short, the ability to name and learn serves us in everyday life. Still, this kind of learning is not necessarily the most we can achieve, the height of accomplishment. Meditation can take us beyond ordinary thinking to a wordless awareness that unites us with all phenomena in the all-encompassing process that life is. Larry Rosenberg, author of Living in the Light of Death, notes that when we cultivate what he calls comprehensive alertness, and learn to recognize a thought as just a thought, to let it go without attaching to it, we are better able to see what our experience really is. That by itself might be a very good reason to let go of naming. But Rosenberg's insight about how the self is reborn every minute out of our attachments really nails the difficulty of letting go of naming birds: it's hard because it's letting go of the self I make out of my attachment to being a knowledgeable birder. "I know this bird. I am a good birder." To not name is to give up the self that prides itself on knowing!

Letting go of words that come to mind in the midst of daily life is hard because the ego creates itself out of those thoughts, minute by minute. It's absolutely astounding how desperate the clinging is. To be, without grasping, for even a second or two, lets me glimpse that I exist as part of the process unfolding in front of me. But in the next second, the ego jumps up and names something, and I am back again to observing it grasping for its identity, creating itself every second, over and over, again, now again, and again. I want to turn everything into a static event: "That's a Wilson's Warbler. Two Wilson's, a Townsend's and an Arizona Woodpecker all flew into the tree at once." The ego makes itself up from these events -- frozen as discrete, graspable things. It just can't exist in the ocean of process; rather, it exists in the momentary repeated events that separate the birds from the air and the trees and the flowers, the soil and rain and sunshine, and of course, that separate me from all of that.

Zen Birding is designed to help us see process and our connection with nature and the amazing diversity of plants and animals. By slowing down, by looking and listening in a very different way from how we usually do, we can actually experience our environment differently. The course is about going deeply into the space between our first awareness of a bird and the moment when we name it. It's about learning to expand the time that we don’t know by simply being with the bird, observing everything we can with our unaided senses, and letting go of names or other words that come to us while we observe. The purpose is to open up that which naming tends to shut down – our curiosity.

We actually see and hear differently when we quiet the part of our brains that analyzes, classifies and names. When we’re not analyzing, classifying and naming, we can see flux and flow, constant movement. Nothing is frozen into an “event;” nothing labeled, put in a box and dismissed; nothing judged unimportant. This way of seeing and listening presents us with a different mix of information about our environment and what’s happening in it, from the information we get when we look and listen with our analytical brain switched on.

So, there's nothing wrong with naming birds. But, it is limiting. And in Zen Birding, we go beyond that limitation. Watts describes the inherent limitation of language and naming in The Way of Liberation, like this: "Words can express no more than a tiny fragment of human knowledge for what we can say and think is always immeasurably less than what we experience. This is not only because there are no limits to the exhaustive description of an event, as there are no limits to the possible divisions of an inch; it is also because there are experiences which defy the very structure of our language, as water cannot be carried in a sieve.” I can't say it any better!

Watts: Yes, it's just that simple, and you can't get there from here

One of those great library experiences, browsing the shelf, led me to check out an early essay by Alan Watts, The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism (1955). The Libraries' copy is one of the original publications, pretty well-worn, a pamphlet really, but it's got a great feel. You can sense its history in the marks on the cover that show that it was earlier taped,

in the inscription inside that shows that Maud gave it to Nancy in June 1955, and in the simpleness of the layout and type.

Watts wrote the essay as the first in a series of monographs published originally by the American Academy of Asian Studies, established four

years earlier in San Francisco, and, in 1954, affiliated with the College of the Pacific. He intended to "clarify the experiential content of Zen Buddhism, in view of the growing interest in the subject among Western psychologists and philosophers" (preface).

This short essay packs a lot in. It's a marvelous description of the methodology of an Eastern undertaking that we in the West can't quite fit into any of our niches -- neither religion, philosophy, nor psychology. He describes it as a way of liberation, rather than any of those other things.

Liberation from what? Well, from "an idea which crops up repeatedly in the history of philosophy and religion -- the idea that the seeming multiplicity of facts, things, and events is in reality One, or, more correctly, beyond duality" (pp. 3-4).

But can an ordinary person experience the state of non-duality, given that our normal psychological way of perceiving anything is by contrast with something else, that is, through duality? How do we get from ordinary experience to the state of non-duality?

Watt describes the four paths down which Zen masters typically send aspiring adherents, and how it is our very linguistic dependence that leads us to the realization of non-duality. In other words, our logical, language-based, linear, left brain ways of understanding non-duality lead to rejection of the question because each path to understanding non-duality leads to a nonsense dead end. For example, the first path, "all things are in reality One," leads us to try to mentally obliterate all differences, to say yes to all experience, for example, to say to ourselves that there is no difference between the Buddha and a movie star, that all is Tao, which normally makes unity seem absurd, which also is Tao...

The path, "all is Void (shunyata)," leads us to say no to all there is. Mu, the sage's "does not have" answer to the koan question of whether a dog has Buddha nature, illustrates this path. The student simply says no to everything, including the saying of no. Again, nonsense.

The path, "just accept yourself as you are and make no effort" similarly leads to collapse. Even the desire to make no effort is an effort.

The typical fourth path turns the question back on the questioner, directing him or her to look at who is questioning, who is uncomfortable, to feel what feels, to know what knows, to make an object of the subject (p. 8). But this too proves impossible. The Buddha can't seek after himself.

In short, the root of the problem is the question (p. 9). If you do not ask the question, the problem will not arise.

Ultimately, trying very hard (to exhaustion!) linguistically to understand non-duality makes clear that what we seek is impossible for us. We come to understand instead the "radical impotence of the ego." We are truly helpless. When we give ourselves up for lost -- when we surrender -- only then, paradoxically, does our desire to know Oneness, our desire for relief from separation and duality cease of its own accord.

And in the midst of this relief we see that life is going on all around us, and there is no rigid boundary between that life and the ego-less me. The breath is an effective illustration of the essential unity between our voluntary and involuntary actions. Down goes our conventional distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, between body and mind. Even our willing or deciding something, a clearly voluntary act, has an involuntary aspect (before conscious decision), or else we would have to infinitely decide to decide to decide...

From this perspective, the 'All is One' path makes sense, as do the other three. But not until we've lost ourselves first. It is an example of the, "you can't get there from here" conundrum. We really can't see the unity of all, or the void, or that we need make no effort, or that there's no self to question, with our left brain, because by nature it believes we are separate and in control.

Zen places the focus on experience always. Even the ultimate koan about whether 'the One is really it' prompts a right brain, non-linear, illogical answer: "When all dualities have been reduced to the One, what does the One reduce to?" -- the master says, "9 pounds of flax" (the weight of a linen robe). There comes a point when we must drop thinking about it and just see. For Westerners, reflection and action are another conventional duality. In Zen, they are essentially the same. We think and act, rather than get caught up in an infinite regression of standing outside our lives, reflecting upon reflections, upon reflections. "In acting just act, in thinking just think. Above all, don't wobble" (p. 15). We don't have to reflect about reflecting. "Zen is also liberation from the dualism of thought versus action, for it thinks as it acts -- with the same quality of abandon, commitment, or faith" (p. 15). The same is true of feeling.

Consider the question of when to stop thinking and to act. We can never be certain we've done enough or too much. Long story short: the only certainty is death. Other than that, all is uncertain. And that 'all,' that includes us. That uncertainty is our very nature. We, the knower, are, thus, the same as the unknown. Et voilà. "... [I]n the final analysis, we have to act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all knowledge and control" (p. 17).

From this point, when we see this, the life of the Bodhisattva begins. We need not strain to improve ourselves, for the effort to do so is just ego. Seeds lead to plants, which lead to trees, but by a process of growth and development, not of effort, or straining to improve. The tree is not an improved seed. (p. 19). Once we see clearly that it is our nature to grow in the same way, change occurs naturally.

Ok. Got that?

Mood in Zen art

Reading books on Zen Buddhism, and taking a class about moving a Zen practice into moment-to-moment awareness, I came across a description of four moods in Zen art (Watts, Alan, 1957. The Way of Zen. Vintage Books, New York., pp. 181-187). I immediately recognized the descriptions in poetry I had read even many years ago, that remained with me because the mood, it turns out, was so powerful. In fact, this chapter on Zen in the arts comes at the end of The Way of Zen, and I thought the book's powerfully expressed insights more or less over, and then, whoosh. Recognition. It occurs to me that these seconds, even parts of seconds, of insight are all and everything there is. I'm reading this book again.

One of the moods is called aware, but not the English word, aware. It's a Japanese word that Watts describes as "extremely untranslatable." He characterizes the mood as "that moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and regret, and seeing it as the very form of the Great Void." All there is. Transcending the duality of knowing and not-knowing.

His example, attributed to Basho, translated by Blyth (see text and footnote on p. 184):

The stream hides itself
 In the grasses
  Of departing autumn.

Which inspired me, having just completed another couple of hours of work in the fall garden, to express aware through Ikebana and haiku:

First frost scares no flower

First frost scares no flower
  Leaves don't decide to fall
      Bulbs up already.

It's not just that there will be a spring, but that it inheres in fall. And it does not care. And yet!

And the class is wonderful -- Austin Zen Center, taught by Joe Hall. He inspires us all!

Mother and me

It turns out that no matter what I believe about life, it is what it is. When my mother died I wanted nothing more than for her to be released from suffering. I have to hope that she has been even though I may not be able to know for sure.

Mother and me, Thanksgiving, 2009

What I do know is that I am still alive. And life is a serious business. It matters. Nancy, the hospice nurse, said "2 hours, 2 days or 2 months" almost exactly 2 months ago. For the rest of us, we don't know how many days or weeks or months or years we have. But why waste a single minute being anything other than what you most fervently desire to be? What you are at your center. Love. All. Peace. One.

You don't have to be alone to be safe, Mother. I hope you know that now. You are never alone anyway. You are part of all that is. You always were. You just didn't see it.